Women’s Soccer League Tries to Connect and Survive

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Jodie Taylor, right, at a youth soccer clinic put on by her professional team, the Washington Spirit. Clinics like these are among several efforts by the team to build a fan base.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

GERMANTOWN, Md. — Natalie Lennartsson, a perky fourth grader who is 10 going on 17, said she didn’t learn “a ton” of new things Wednesday at a soccer clinic hosted by the Washington Spirit, the local women’s professional team.

“We did a lot of drills,” Natalie said. “But, you know, we already know a lot about the game.”

Of course she does. Natalie has been playing soccer since she was 6.

At the clinic, for 100 young girls obsessed with soccer, Natalie wore a jersey from her traveling team, the North Carroll Nighthawks, based about an hour away in Maryland. Her long blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail and kept in place by a rainbow-colored headband. She dribbled the ball with ease, as if it were tethered to her toes by an invisible string.

Girls like Natalie have flocked to soccer since Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey at the 1999 World Cup — the moment when mainstream America finally noticed that women played soccer.

Fifteen years later, you would think that a women’s professional league would be thriving in this country. With all of the talk about the benefits of Title IX and how that law has boosted women’s participation in sports, you would figure that such a league would be a no-brainer.

Not even close. The Spirit’s league, the National Women’s Soccer League, is in its second season, and its long-term viability is uncertain. Women’s sports leagues in this country can’t draw fans, either at live events or on television, the way men’s leagues can.

Even when the thousands of female college athletes who benefited from Title IX become ticket buyers, they often choose to spend their money on men’s sporting events. And even when the girls like Natalie grow up, many end up forsaking their childhood sports heroes for male superstars. It’s almost as if they realize that their own athleticism, with all the beauty and purity seen at its highest level, isn’t entertaining anymore.

The struggle of women’s sports leagues has long been a nagging problem. In the world of women’s professional team sports, progress always seems to be inch by inch, if there is progress at all.

If there are marked strides, they seem to be made on the back of a men’s league. The W.N.B.A. would probably not exist without the help of the N.B.A. (The American Basketball League, a women’s organization that had no connection to the N.B.A., folded in 1998 after just two full seasons.)

Two main women’s pro soccer leagues preceded the N.W.S.L. Both failed, including one that arose on the heels of that exhilarating 1999 World Cup victory.

The United States hasn’t won a World Cup title since then. Its chances of winning next year took a hit this month when the United States Soccer Federation fired the women’s national team coach, Tom Sermanni, to many people’s surprise. That left the team looking for a new coach with less than seven months before the start of qualifying for the 2015 World Cup.

It’s just one more unknown, though, for the American women who are doing their best to succeed on an international level while pushing for the new league to catch on with fans.

“It’s going to take much more than a World Cup win for this league to be successful,” said Yael Averbuch, one of the national team players on the Spirit. “To make this work, it’s complicated.”

It will take persistence, as well as some humility. To keep the league viable, players must make sacrifices.

On the Spirit, some players, like Jordan Angeli, live with host families because they can’t afford to pay rent with their small salaries. Others learn to live with a salary of $6,000, the league minimum, every season.

Every player participates in clinics, like the one on Wednesday, which was free, to kindle interest in a potential fan base.

“You don’t see men’s teams doing this all the time, mostly because they don’t have to,” said Jodie Taylor, a British player on the team. “But we’re doing this because we love the game and think this is important. We have to change some people’s ideas of the women’s game. Some people still don’t give the women respect because they’re constantly comparing us to the men.”

For the league to survive, it needs potential fans to understand that the game can offer so much that the men’s game doesn’t. Games are held at stadiums like the Spirit’s Maryland SoccerPlex, where the worst seat is eight rows above the field.

The Spirit’s owner, Bill Lynch, said that having 3,000 fans at every home game would “really make the team sustainable” but that reaching the number might take three to five years. The Spirit had about 2,300 at their home opener last week.

Lynch said the team could “stay afloat” even without reaching that 3,000-fan benchmark. Still, he is trying to lure fans from other sporting events.

“We have moms and dads who have been Redskins fans for 20, 30, 40 years and have to find a way to catch on with them,” he said.

On paper, this women’s league looks as if it could be around for a while. Each franchise has a budget of about $1 million to $1.5 million, Lynch said, much less than each team had in previous leagues. The teams play in stadiums appropriate for the sizes of their fan bases, not in cavernous stadiums meant to hold 50,000.

The United States Soccer Federation has never been more invested in the success of a women’s pro league. Each team is anchored by national team players whose salaries are paid by the federation. The Spirit have several Canadian and Mexican national team players whose federations pitch in for their salaries.

But the lasting edge the league has — or should have — over men’s pro leagues is that the athletes can appeal to young female athletes in ways men never can.

It’s hard to imagine a male professional athlete shouting: “Don’t ever change your heart. Stay true to yourself!” That was what one of the Spirit players said to the 100 girls at the clinic.

It may sound corny, but if you are a 10-year-old girl like Natalie Lennartsson, those words resonate.

“That’s so cool,” she said as she smiled and nudged one of her friends.

“The reason I want to meet these players, and why I want to go to their games, is because they are like me,” she said.

Email: juliet@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Desperate League Looks to Connect in Order to Survive. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe